Continuing this discussion from here Sonic's raw food/juice/fasting to avoid derailing that thread.
Being immersed within the confines of this website, and having a basic grip on what has already been proven with regards to this disease, it has been both eye opening and alarming to venture outside of here on to other forums and youtube videos which discuss the topic of pfs. In addition to this, some recent posts from a few of the regular posters here questioning the veracity of muscle wastage claims and pondering if pfs is partly psychogenic have been bemusing to say the least. If you aren’t aware of some of the faulty claims and in some cases outright falsehoods being spread about pfs, have a look at this
Exhibit 1:
“The Truth About Propecia For Hair Loss | Dr. Niedbalski”
In this video, which has nearly 250,000 views, a hair transplant surgeon has this to say about post finasteride syndrome
“There have been patients that have lost, err, sexual function after taking propecia and then it didn’t come back after discontinuing that. These are likely patients that have had predisposing factors, err, for impotence and sexual dysfunction such as low testosterone, hypertension, diabetes… they start taking propecia and it really kind of pushes them over a cliff they were heading over anyway um, so when they stop the propecia they really never recover their full sexual function because, you know, they… again, they already have other reasons for that, it would’ve happened anyway regardless of whether propecia was in the picture or not.”
It is one thing to neutrally report the data from Merck’s studies and to state that, statistically, side effects appear to be rare. However, the statement above is a despicable lie. There is no data or study to support his assertion. He speaks as though persistent sexual side effects are a rudimentary mathematical equation: A healthy man is at 100; finasteride is -20; if a healthy man takes finasteride, he is at 80, and will not experience persistent side effects. A diabetic man is at 40; if he takes finasteride, he is at 20 and has persistent side effects. Junk pseudoscience from a hair transplant surgeon. The hair transplant industry depends upon finasteride; comments are, naturally, disabled for this video.
Exhibit 2:
Youtuber Kevin Mann has this to say on the subject of post finasteride syndrome:
"I would disregard all the bullshit anecdotal arguments that people are using on those, er, websites, a lot of them are financially motivated, they wanna… they’re, they’re pursuing lawsuits, in fact if you go to those websites like propecia help they actually have, err, lawyers advertising their website saying “let us help you sue merck” or “let us help you sue your pharmacist so you can get rich” so a lot of these people are just looking to make a quick buck, err, they’re deliberately exaggerating the side effects, err, there’s no mechanistic data whatsoever that shows that finasteride has any irreversible side effects… the side effects will go away if you stop using it… The idea that something is completely irreversible is just, err, is just completely fallacious."
"And another thing I’ll point out about the members of propecia help forum, if you look at these guys, these just some of like, the saddest most, err, pathetic bunch of incels you can ever imagine, we’re talking about people who have never stepped foot in the gym in their entire life, people who are either diabetic, prediabetic, a lot of these people have cardiovascular issues and all these health problems can contribute to erectile dysfunction, so, there’s a very good chance that these people already had like, issues with erectile dysfunction due to their health problems and, you know, it’s either that finasteride made it a little bit worse or, made them more conscientious of their problem cause of all the problems they’ve heard with it, and, it’s best just to ignore that bullshit and just take the finasteride like an aspirin and forget about it, because I’m a firm believer in the nocebo effect and the nocebo effect, for those who don’t know, is like the opposite of placebo, the idea that, if you really really think something negative is gonna happen then something negative will happen so it’s very important just to ignore that bullshit… it’s all just a bunch of bullshit and keep in mind that these people, as boisterous and vocal as they are, are in the extreme minority so, don’t take what they say seriously"
Difficult to know where to begin with such spiteful and unsubstantiated allegations. To date, to my knowledge, the most any patient has seen from a lawsuit is around $9000, and that was the result of a huge class action lawsuit that took years to resolve. For reference, recently, there was a case of a girl suing Starbucks because she spilt hot tea on her arm even though
She was carrying the coffee in her left hand, the cookie in her right and the tea between her elbow and ribs when the tea spilt on her.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/girl-scalded-spilt-starbucks-tea-17326240 The complaint was that Starbucks should have offered her a tray. Starbucks paid her ÂŁ75,000 ($90,000). The notion that people congregate here to find a way to sue somebody over an imagined illness is laughable, not least because we do not have evidence providing a causative link, so no substantive lawsuit can currently go ahead.
Again the baseless allegation is made that pfs is sexual side effects induced by diabetes and aggravated by finasteride. Again, it is implied that people with preexisiting neuroticism are inducing their own symptoms through anxiously reading about side effects.
Exhibit 3:
“Post-Finasteride Syndrome: An Induced Delusional Disorder with the Potential of a Mass Psychogenic Illness?”
Exhibit 4:
I’ll reproduce here various comments taken from recent threads on the hairlosstalk forum:
As you can see, with many people, the notion that pfs is a psychosomatic illness is deeply embedded.
With this in mind, it is somewhat troubling to see some pfs patients here ponder whether some symptoms are psychosomatic. By all means, speak for yourself if you think part of your condition may be in part psychogenic. Much in the same way users are encouraged to preface any post which proclaims a theory for why pfs is occurring with “In my opinion”, it is probably best if you write “in my case” if you suspect a psychological factor behind a given symptom. I will speak for myself here and state it unequivocally and without doubt: there is absolutely no psychogenic component to my symptomology whatsoever. So abrupt, forceful and devastating has this syndrome been that I have never once questioned whether I may have imagined it in part or in whole. It is an entirely organic and physiological disease which has wrought damage to my brain and my body. I was a normal, very healthy, athletic, socially well adapted 32 year old man before I took finasteride. I did not and do not have diabetes or a “background of a histrionic personality disorder”.